Transliteration

What it does is simple: you type in Hindi stuff phonetically in English, and it converts it into proper Devanāgarī characters. So, by typing in ‘Ankit’ into Blogger’s post page, I get ‘अंकित’. On the fly. Simply too cool.

Writing in anything other than English is too hard. I know, I’ve tried it. Here are your main options:

Setup your computer to use a different keyboard layout for other languages. This is really awkward. I used a permanent marker on keyboard and marked what all the keys map to when entering Hindi/Gujarati, just to help my Mom a little bit. It wasn’t much use.

Use some one screen keyboard software. Point and click. Too slow.

Google may just have come up with a winner here. This is a very nice compromise, as most of us Indians are already used to typing Hindi phonetically in English.

I’m guessing that ew stands for ‘English word’ and hws for ‘Hindi words’. So for an input word ‘google’, the suggested Hindi words are “गूगल,गुगल,गूगले,गूग्ले,गूग्ल”. The rest is up to the client—to do what it wants. A simple, and powerful web service.

It even supports multiple words, comma-separated. The output for text=hello,world:

Too bad, the URL seems to be require you to be already authenticated, else it gives a 404. If they were gonna require authentication anyway, why put in an infinite loop—while(1);—in the output? Kinda nasty to anyone who tries to eval it.

I really hope that they put up a GData API for this, soon. And that they start supporting more languages. And they add this feature to Google Docs, et cetera.